Typically, at a restaurant on receiving a bill, a dining customer gives his/her credit card to the waiter for payment. The waiter takes the card away from the customer sight to a cash register with a built in card payment processing capability to process the payment with a card processor.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art method of handling and processing payments from a restaurant patron 06 at a dining table with a merchant 08 with a payment processing terminal 04. A partition 20 divides the dining tables from the place where the card payment is processed. A waiter makes many trips to process a payment from a patron 06. As illustrated, in trip 1, waiter presents a bill to a customer. In trip 2, after the customer gives a credit card, the waiter takes it away to the payment terminal 04 and processes the payment transaction with a card processor 36. In trip 3, the waiter brings the payment slip for signature to the customer, as well as for the customer to add a tip on the payment slip. In trip 4, after the customer adds a tip and signs the payment slip, the waiter takes the signed slip and reruns the final payment transaction to include the tip.
In this prior art, the customer hands over a bankcard that has personal sensitive information to an employee of the restaurant in the course of the payment of the restaurant bill. The employee turnover in this industry is very high. The waiter employee of the restaurant may be a dishonest person that misuses the customer personal information. In addition, a waiter makes four trips, as described above, to process a payment, making processing a payment a labor-intensive activity.
A news item from Daily Breeze, Jan. 20, 2002; page A5 shows that a credit card fraud ring uses restaurant workers.
In light of the above, it is an objective of the present invention to provide an apparatus and method that facilitates payment for a meal in a restaurant without providing sensitive information from the bankcards to employee-waiter.
Another objective is to make more efficient processing of bankcard payments from a customer to the restaurant merchant.